This is why I tend to stick to POSIX shell scripting these days, avoiding even bash. The restriction does make some things too painful, though. Before the latest POSIX revision, certain workflows were comically hard to do (unless you combine sh with... M4). The 2024 revision injects some much-needed sanity, but I am wondering, will random computers have shells compliant with that revision?

Back in the day, as I mentioned around a few times, I found refuge in XEmacs, coming from the comfy Borland IDEs world.

However, I also had to get comfortable enough with vi, because most customer systems that we would be required to access on a support visit, or remotely, only had ed and vi available.

Even if we nowadays stick with Linux distros instead of UNIX in general, there is still the issue of what is there by default.

Yep POSIX shell scripting can be a bit painful, which is why knowing a bit awk, perl and sed might help as well, as they tend to be available by default.